School of Computer Science and Software Engineering

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Start date

Jan 2007

Submission date

Sabrina Ahmad

Thesis

Measuring the Effectiveness of Negotiation in Requirements Engineering

Summary

The biggest challenge in software development is to define the right thing to develop. It is seldom a technical problem which inhibit productivity and quality. Instead, the vast majority of requirements problems are related to human interactions, process and communications. Hence, we’re studying negotiation in requirements engineering to adopt a prevention approach in order to obtain a better set of software requirements.

Previous study in negotiation provides a wide range of new methods, techniques and tools while evaluating these new approaches is crucial to allow the acquisition of information that can be used to conform and to strengthen the theories and practice. In addition, software engineering is a young discipline, so its theories, methods, models, and techniques still need to be fully developed and assessed.

This justifies the need to focus on the measurement in this research. Besides, the very nature of software engineering makes measurement a necessity, otherwise the amount of risk of software projects may become excessive. This would produce obvious damages to both software developers (e.g., higher costs, schedule slippage) and users (e.g., poor quality products, late product delivery, and high prices).

This research is focusing on measuring the effectiveness of negotiation in terms of;

1. The improvement in the stakeholders’ agreement level

2. The improvement in the requirements quality and

3. The reduction of the total project cost

Why my research is important

This research is foreseen to provide empirical evidence on the effectiveness of negotiation in requirements engineering practice.